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Every November developers around the world tune into Microsoft Connect(), a developer focused event held by Microsoft that demonstrates the latest and greatest from the company. These events include product announcements for the latest technologies from Microsoft, compelling demos, and in-depth work sessions. It is nearly impossible to see all of the sessions while balancing a full work schedule, but Kevin was able to catch a couple of sessions and wanted to share some of what he heard.

You can read more in-depth notes from Kevin on his blog at https://aligneddev.net/blog/2017/ms-connect-2017-notes/.

The main keynote by Scott Guthrie gave a broad look into what the latest from Microsoft is and where this year will be heading.

• Mobile Development with Xamarin keeps getting better
  • Visual Studio App Center will help iterate quickly with the build, test, distribute, learn feedback loop
• Containers, Docker, Microservices are becoming more mainstream. Many teams are thinking about them and moving to them. Azure Container Services (AKS) will help with that.

• There are several good sessions on "Modernizing" existing applications with Docker and App Service Fabric.

• DevOps
  • Continuous Improvement “everyone is looking to try and adopt”
  • VSTS is a complete solution for work items to build and deploy.
  • Donavan Brown shared how the VSTS team uses VSTS to build VSTS with 500 developers and 50 feature teams.
  • VSTS Release Gates looks to be a great new feature for deployment pipelines.
• Data
  • SQL Server 2017 has "Ultimate flexibility "
    • Already in Azure SQL Server
    • Works on Windows Server, Linux, Docker
    • Fastest ever ML directly in-memory database
    • Auto-tuning, threat detection On-premise or managed

• • New SQL Operations Studio download available 

• Migration Tool to Azure SQL
  • Existing to Azure SQL as a service Fully automated, wizard
  • Even for Oracle Migration
  • Minimal downtime
• Cosmos DB
  • Guaranteed low latency
  • Only pay for storage and throughput
  • Scalable to terabytes and millions/sec SLAs
  • It is supporting more tech all the time
• Artificial Intelligence
• Azure Data Bricks
• Apache Sparks Based
• Intelligent Edge + Intelligent Cloud

All of the video recordings are available from Channel 9. Great in-depth content is available along with more keynotes featuring announcements. We are excited to work with Microsoft technologies and utilize all the ways they enable us to build better solutions for our customers. We will continue learning with the innovations and encourage you to do the same. As Scott Guthrie and others have said every year "there's never been a better time to be a developer." We couldn't agree more.